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Dayan Jayatilleka served as advisor when President Premadasa strengthened LTTE with heavy arms

Bradman Weerakoon : Rendering Unto Caesar. Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo, 2004, pp. 300-304.

At the meeting with Premadasa at Sucharita two of the groupâ€™s members Edward Ratnasabapathy and Sivagnam who had come down from Jaffna for that purpose, indicated to Premadasa that on the instructions of the LTTE they would assure Premadasa that they would call off their boycott and help support him in voting against the impeachment motion. At the time I thought it was very unusual that the LTTE would wish to protect Premadasa and see that he continued as president. It served to indicate that even though overtly conflict was ongoing between the LTTE and the government troops, as far as the LTTE was concerned, Premadasa was still the politically safer â€˜betâ€™ on the Sinhala side. After all, he had opened peace negotiations with them, providedÂ them with arms to fight the TNA and had tried to bring them into the mainstream of the Sri Lankan polity. Why then, the sudden urge to kill him on the first day of May 1993 when he had still some time to serve? Jayatilaka and the police say the Tigers did it. â€˜He generated hope to the Tamil community,â€™ says the presidential adviser. â€˜The Tigers had to kill him. They are clearly the prime suspects. But according to Justice Minister Hameed, â€˜it is still not clear who was responsible beyond a shadow of a doubt.â€™ By the end, there were a lot of people who hated him enough to kill him…

Asiaweek

On the day he died, 68 year-old President Ranasinghe Premadasa woke up at 4 am, as he had through most of his 40-year political career. He did his yoga, and at 5:15 he read the newspapers. At 7:30 he called his public relations officer and asked him to collect the â€˜facts and figuresâ€™ that reflected his record since he became president in 1988. He would use it to address the ruling United National Partyâ€™s annual rally on the Galle Face Green, on Colomboâ€™s ocean front. â€˜I want to tell the people how I guided the nation,â€™ he said.

At 11:30 Premadasa, meticulous as ever, went to inspect the procession of party faithful he would lead to the green from Colomboâ€™s Sugadadasa Sports Stadium. Life-size posters of the president lined the route of the march. Security was light, despite an army announcement that a Tamil Tiger hit squad had slipped into the capital. At Armour Street the president jumped out of his Range Rover to ask his supporters to line up to begin the procession [if his jump had been spontaneous then it was awkward for a LTTE suicide bomber to schedule.]

Early in his career Premadasa was befriended by several powerful businessmen. One was S. Rajendram, the Tamil founder of the Maharaja Organisation, today one of the countryâ€™s richest groups. Another was Sinhalese land developer A.K. Dharmadasa. Both prospered under the UNPâ€™s economic liberalization program. More recently Dharmadasa and Maharajaâ€™s son Killi became known in business circles as â€˜the forcesâ€™. They had access to Premadasaâ€™s close confidant, Secretary of Finance R. Paskaralingam, a Tamil who was considered the second most powerful man in the country…

UNP politicians used the emergency rule to take out political opponents, while Premadasa turned a blind eye. Some say he gave the orders.

One such case was the murder of journalist Richard de Zoysa. Police suspected as de Zoysa had friends among the JVP students at Colombo University, the movementâ€™s urban base. On the night of Feb.18, 1990, Ronnie Gunasinghe, a senior superintendent for police and a confidant of Premadasa, was having drinks with Deputy Defence Minister Ranjan Wijeratne. At one point, says a senior police officer, Wijeratne called Premadasa and told him of a plan to pick up the journalist [neither tea planter Wijeratne nor policeman Ronnie Gunasinghe had served like Dayan Jayatilleka as an infiltrator of the Left]. The next day de Zoysaâ€™s tortured body was found floating off a beach south of Colombo. Wijeratne was killed in a car bomb explosion in March 1991. Gunasinghe died with Premadasa in the explosion last week.

By February 1990 the carnage was over and Premadasa had won the war in the south. But Indian troops were still entrenched in the north, bogged down in a fight with Tamil Tigers. Premadasa, however, had secured a ceasefire with the Tigers. According to Presidential adviser Dayan Jayatilaka, Premadasa ordered the Sri Lankan Air Force to evacuate to safety the wife and daughter of the Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran from their jungle hideout. He then ordered the military to deliver heavy arms to the Tigers to use against the Indians and rival Tamil groups.

In thirteen months of talks in Colombo, Premadasa offered the guerillas more than any other Sinhalese leader had. The Tigers used the time to regroup, while the Sri Lankan army was confined to barracks. In June 1990, four months after the Indian troops withdrew, the Tigers accused the president of â€˜saying one thing and doing another.â€™ War broke out again, and Premadasa was blamed. â€˜Every time one of my Far men gets his leg blown off,â€™ said an army captain in 1990, â€˜I think of Our President…â€™

Eastern Economic Review: Who killed Premadasa?

His government had been widely blamed for the assassination eight days earlier of popular opposition leader Lalith Athulathmudali, a former UNP minister who had tried to topple Premadasa in 1991 through an impeachment motion in parliament. When it failed, the rebels were expelled from the UNP and parliament, and formed their own Democratic United National Front (DUNF) to continue the challenge. A gunman killed Athulathmudali on 23 April at a campaign meeting for elections on 17 May to seven of Sri Lankaâ€™s nine provincial councils, the first test of his new partyâ€™s appeal. The authorities also attributed this killing to the LTTE, and produced a body dead of cyanide poisoning to prove it.

Scepticism was widespread, and anti-government violence broke out during Athulathmudaliâ€™s funeral. Anonymous leaflets sent to foreign embassies alleged that a government minister had hired two professional killers to do the job

Hamish McDonald, May 13, 1993, pp. 18-19 May 12, 1993, pp. 21-24

Â (‘Sudumahattaya’ of the Borella-Rajagiriya underworld subcontractor area of JRJ, Premadasa and Sirisena Cooray was produced in Court as firing the handgun.)

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